I picked up the bags of wrapping paper and held them out to her. After a very hesitant moment, she took them from me.
“Don’t be stingy with the bows,” I said. “And don’t worry; I won’t contest the impeachment. I wouldn’t want to be a part of any club that would even consider having you as president. I’ll start my own community club, again, after the holidays. So get ready to lose enrollment, because don’t kid yourself, Brittany. Nice or not, nobody likes you. Later, Ms. T.”
I was out in the hall before Brittany figured out her comeback.
“You’d better watch your back, Kyle. That vid isn’t even the start of what’s coming your way.”
I wanted nothing more than to wedge myself into a cubby and hide beneath my coat until everyone else went home. But a cluster of boys started cracking up when they saw me. Chief among them was Derek Boger of the nine-hundred-times-viewed Mr. E.–and–Kyla Cheng remake video. Park Prep’s faculty loved to tell us that in ten years most of us would be leaders in our chosen fields. I’d always felt proud of that thought. Now it terrified me. This was the best and brightest?
“I like clothes,” Marcus Graham mimicked.
“Excuse me, milk brains,” I said as I pushed through them. “Victim of a spurious and fake defamation campaign trying to walk here.”
Only once I was a good ten feet away did Derek call out, “Slut.”
I stopped. Inhaled deeply. In debate there was nothing worse than an opponent who refused to get riled up. So, with a cheery smile, I turned. It’s all about the ruse, right?
“That’s it?” I asked pleasantly. “Come on, Derek. You attend one of the most prestigious high schools in the country. Put your parents’ tuition dollars to use. If you can’t be clever, at least be intelligent.”
Farther down the hall, an overly thin, black-clad form came out of a classroom, saw us, and then hurried away in the opposite direction.
Jessie.
“For example,” I said as I backed away, toward Jessie, “your video might have a few hundred views, making you popular for an afternoon, but mine has a few hundred thousand, so you erroneously call me a ‘slut,’ but I can truthfully call you a ‘nobody’ or a ‘waste of space’ or, if we’re sticking to single words, ‘forgettable.’ I could get personal and say ‘acne.’ Or, if you want to talk sex lives, ‘virgin.’ Or I could play it infantile and simply say, ‘F you, Derek Boner. I never should have let you copy my Civics homework all last year.’ See? The possibilities are endless.”
Derek blinked a few times, stunned. Crickets from his crew, until in unison they burst out laughing—at him. Alex Stu jogged over and high-fived me. Farther down the hall, Jessie turned the corner by the framed photo of Park Prep’s first graduating class. It had been taken over seventy-five years ago, when suspenders seemed to be a thing.
“Ta-ta, boys,” I said, then called out, “Jessie, wait.”
I trilled my fingers, then hurried down the hall. Jessie didn’t wait. When I turned the corner, she glanced back, then cut a hard right and sprinted down the spiral staircase nicknamed Ankle Breaker thanks to more than a few incidents involving Doc-focused students. I leaned over the railing.
“Jessie, hold up.”
Now she took the stairs two at a time. And normally I would have laughed to see her tottering like that on her vintage Manolos, but I was too annoyed, plus lightly vertigo-stricken.
“Please don’t make me chase you.”
Holding on to the rail, I ran down Ankle Breaker, cursing under my breath. On one, I bumped into Ellie Cyr.
“Oh,” she said, surprised.
We did a side-to-side shuffle, trying to get around each other. I couldn’t tell if it equaled purposeful or not. Either way, by the time I’d followed Jessie outside, she’d already hopped into a black sedan. It wasn’t an interborough taxi or an Elite. It was her personal car, with her personal driver. I ran up to the window as the car pulled into traffic. She gave me a weird grimace, mouthed what looked like “Smile,” and then sped away.
Discreetly as possible—plugging one nostril, inhaling; plugging the other, exhaling—I did Audra’s insomniac breathing exercises all the way to the train. Audra swore it soothed her enough to occasionally sleep. And while I didn’t feel the least bit calmer, I figured the added oxygen couldn’t hurt my psyche, unlike remembering how placid Jessie’s face was as she was driven away.
It wasn’t until the B train emerged aboveground to cross the Manhattan Bridge that I began to feel like a semiadequately capable person again. Attempting to leave my drama in Brooklyn, I focused on the girl across from me, who was in the cutest parka. I Sourced her to see where she got it, then used the Woofer-based Hey, Neighbor! facial-scanning app to see if she was in fashion. But she must have Hey, Neighbor!-ed me first. Her CB profile showed that she was watching my video. Ten clicks later, my Doc dinged as I was tagged in a pic—sitting as I was still sitting—above the caption: That sex vid girl sitting across from me on the B train.
Instantly I uploaded a pic of her to CB with the caption: Thanks for making your burrito my problem #fartsinsmallspaces.
Woofer took care of the rest. Her Doc whistled. She glanced at it, then quickly looked at me, huffed, and moved down the train. I was too busy Hey, Neighbor!-ing other people to care. It wasn’t just her. The next person and the next and the next—in fact, the entire car of nearly sixty people—were watching my video. Chains like this were common. But I’d never been the subject of one.
I got off at West 4th and decided not to transfer to the A train, even though it was two stops too soon and meant a fifty-minute walk. Outside on Sixth Avenue, it felt even warmer than it had in Brooklyn and to prove it, the sidewalks were coated with an inch of gray slush. Still I put up my coat hood. If that was what public transportation was going to be like, I guessed I’d better get used to hoofing it.
Almost an hour later, I stepped inside the enormous open-air atrium of Eden’s entrance. It was like entering a hybrid of a space-agey future utopia and the coolest parts of Brooklyn. There was a hotel, gourmet food shops, restaurants, cocktail bars, and an entire floor that was a play zone for kids. The level I was meeting the hacker on was an open-air market, with food trucks, sidewalks, and trees that wove throughout. As hologram snowflakes fell, requisite holiday music was piped into the air. Around every bend were Expert desks and displays of Docs to buy.
As a backdrop, the largest screen in the world—no, literally; it was in Guinness—showed the most popular G-File users who were doing their last-minute Eden holiday shopping right at that moment. Presently, it was the two-time YurTube Planet Award–winning actress Lucy Helen Banks. The screen showed the most-viewed clip from her latest film.